As announced by Kris Rice (who is the product manager for SQL Developer, Apex Listener and Oracle XE), the Oracle Express Edition (XE) Database version 11g is now (finally!) available for 64-bit Windows.

It's been a looong wait; the 64-bit version for Windows was expected to be released around the same time as the 32-bit version, some 3 years ago.

Couple of weeks ago there was a Twitter discussion started by Martin Bach (@MartinDBA) about cases for logical standby implementation. A rolling upgrade was mentioned by Tim Gorman (@timothyjgormanas) as one of potential recommendations for using this rare use product. I have been involved in such project in the past and I prepared an instruction and did quite large number of rolling upgrades from 11.1 into 11.2.

Readers of an earlier post on this blog will know about my latest forays into the world of Direct NFS. Part of that means stumbling over configuration hiccups or slamming into brick walls when you find new bugs.

In this post, I’m installing the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.4) software on Oracle Linux 6.4, along with optional instructions on how to apply the latest Patch Set Update (PSU) to your new Oracle home. First and foremost, before you start, make sure your Linux server meets the minimum hardware requirements: 1GB of RAM (plus

When I started my current role a few months ago, I was very interested to learn that direction had been set to migrate away from ASM and onto NFS storage that had some read flash cache in front of it. I'm not the world's biggest fan of ASM and the (more...)

While creating sophisticated mobile apps that provide a rich feature set takes time, expectedly, what is wonderful about the recently launched Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile App Designer is the fact that you can be up and running without requiring a week-long training and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering.

Oracle launched a brand new addition to its Business Intelligence Mobile solution - BI Mobile App Designer, which lets you create stunning, interactive mobile apps, literally within minutes. Apps created run on mobile devices running a reasonably modern mobile browser - that can handle HTML5 and jQuery - and are (more...)

2 days ago I gave a presentation “Oracle 12c from the attackers perspective” at the DOAG SIG Security. I learned some interesting things, especially that a fix for the Oracle oradebug “disable auditing” problem is available since 9 months.

Quick note for people using NFS for shared storage on RAC database. Till RHEL5 we had to ensure nfs,nfslock and portmap service has to be running. These services are required otherwise you will get following errors while mounting database

Attention all data modellers - we are pleased to announce the release of SQL Developer Data Modeler 3.3. This release includes a new search, reports can be generated from search results, extended Excel import and export capabilities and more control and flexibility in generating your (more...)

See the blog post over at Oracle for details, and be sure to send Christopher Jones an email (via the address in his post) stating you're an active user of the client. As Christopher mentions in his post,

You can really help us justify resources for the OS X bundle if you email me letting me know you are a fan. Since Instant Client is a free download, it is tricky for us to know how widely it gets used.

Jump to OTN to download, but please remember to email Christopher as well, if you're interested in seeing the client (more...)

I had been working today on AQ issue where messages were not moving from WAIT to READY State.This was on 11.2.0.3 database running on RHEL5u6(64 bit). I thought of quickly documenting it for easy reference When you enqueue record, you can specify delay after which record should be ready for dequeue. During this time, MSG_STATE [...]

While working with ADRCI , I came to know that we can run normal SQL commands for some of the operation.e.g To display current purge policy , you can run select * from adr_control instead of show control. adrci> desc ADR_CONTROL Name Type NULL? ----------------------------- --------------- ----------- ADRID number SHORTP_POLICY number LONGP_POLICY number LAST_MOD_TIME timestamp [...]

[I originally posted this over at the Pythian blog. If you're not following it, you should! Way more content, by far smarter people than lil ol' me.]

After reviewing my blog post about running EBS OVM templates in VirtualBox, two of my teammates suggested that I work on something with potentially broader appeal. Their basic message was, "This is really cool for us EBS nerds, but what about the Core DBAs?"

So how does "11gR2 RAC in an hour" sound? In this post, I'll demonstrate how to deploy the pre-built Oracle VM templates to create a two-node (more...)